As with earlier VRM workshops, it’s a free unconference, organized on the open space model. Participants choose the topics, move those topics forward in open discussion, and share progress with the whole group at the end of each day.

You can get a sense of the energy in a VRM gathering from photo galleries here, here, here, here and here.

For those of you not familiar with VRM, the letters stand for Vendor Relationship Management, and it’s about the tools that developers and friends are creating to provide individuals with tools of independence form organizations that wish to control them — and better means for engaging with those organizations. In other words, it’s about blowing up silos and walled gardens, and creating a better system: one in which individuals are the collection centers for their own data, and the ones controlling what gets done with that data.

There are many projects and topics already moving forward that should get a boost from participation at the workshop. Here in the UK this week I met with folks involved in MyDex and The Mine! Project — the latter in a VRM Hub meeting last night overlooking the Thames and Blackfriars Bridge.

In Boston I’m looking forward to a lot of discussion on a topic we might call HCRM, or Health Care Relationship Management. The Boston area is a hotbed of forward thinking about patients controlling their own health care data, and reforming the health care from the individual side of the relationshp with the systems in control of it.

I could (and should) write more, but I’m in London waiting for a plane, lucky to have any connectivity at all. (Which, if I’d had enough at my hotel this week, this would have been posted much earlier.)